How it works

In a nutshell, the Photonic Instrument employs one of these IP cameras:-

FI8907W Foscam IP camera.

inside a windowless integrating sphere, dimly lit with a white LED arranged like this behind the camera:-

Inside the integrating sphere.

to produce noisy images that look like this:-

Exactly what the camera sees.

And each image’s JPEG file is the entropy. It’s an extremely correlated bit fixing source, averaging ~21.4kB in size. Such a file’s entropy is conservatively assessed for cryptographic purposes at 21kb, and the instrument can produce 10 frames per second. If you exclude the overhead for entropy extraction, the Photonic Instrument creates about 210kb of entropy per second.

Following entropy extraction to generate a 500kB file of independent and identically distributed random bytes, the rudimentary ent program gives the following encouraging verdict:-